Kabul, Mar 19 (EFE).- The Taliban has banned the broadcasting of women’s voices on radio programs in the southern province of Kandahar in Afghanistan.
“The broadcast of women’s voices on the radio is absolutely prohibited, including the airing of any messages from women in entertainment programs,” Kandahar’s Information and Culture Directorate said in a directive to media outlets on Tuesday.
This ban is unprecedented in the province, which faced restrictions on broadcasting female voices so far but could still broadcast certain advertisements or programs produced in Kabul that included women’s voices, the Afghanistan Journalists Center said in a statement after obtaining a copy of the directive.
Kandahar is now the second province, after Helmand, located in the southwest of the country, to impose a total and official ban on the broadcasting of female voices on radio.
The Taliban also banned radio advertising of medicines, creams and cosmetic powders, as well as promotions of clinics and hospitals, without official authorization from the Public Health Directorate.
Kandahar currently has a dozen radio stations, eleven of them private, but no local television channel.
This ban is in line with an order issued by the Taliban last year prohibiting the broadcast of images of living beings on television, and which greatly hindered their activity.
Afghanistan has witnessed the disappearance of more than half of the 547 media outlets operating in the country before August 2021, when the Taliban took control of Kabul.
Many journalists left Afghanistan in the wake of the fundamentalists’ rise to power, while several of those who remained are victims of threats and have even been arrested.
This has added to the steady rise in restrictions against women, whose rights have almost completely been curtailed. One of the most recent directives in this regard, imposed in August last year, banned the sound of the female voice in public.
According to the nonprofit Reporters Without Borders (RSF), Afghanistan ranked 178 out of 180 in the 2024 press freedom index, only above Syria and Eritrea. EFE
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